Infrastructure for Component-Based DDS Application Development

Enterprise distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems are
increasingly being developed with the use of component-based
software techniques. Unfortunately, commonly used component
middleware platforms provide limited support for event-based publish/subscribe (pub/sub) mechanisms that meet both quality-ofservice (QoS) and conﬁgurability requirements of DRE systems.
On the other hand, although pub/sub technologies, such as OMG
Data Distribution Service (DDS), support a wide range of QoS settings, the level of abstraction they provide make it hard to con-
ﬁgure them due to the signiﬁcant source-level conﬁguration that
must be hard-coded at compile time or tailored at run-time using proprietary, ad hoc conﬁguration logic. Moreover, developers
of applications using native pub/sub technologies must write large
amounts of boilerplate “glue” code to support run-time conﬁguration of QoS properties, which is tedious and error-prone. This paper
describes a novel, generative approach that combines the strengths
of QoS-enabled pub/sub middleware with component-based middleware technologies. In particular, this paper describes the design
and implementation of DDS4CIAO which addresses a number of
inherent and accidental complexities in the DDS4CCM standard.
DDS4CIAO simpliﬁes the development, deployment, and conﬁguration of component-based DRE systems that leverage DDS’s powerful QoS capabilities by provisioning DDS QoS policy settings
and simplifying the development of DDS applications.